[open] I will probably ghost this thread

[Beryl]

There is a place in the forest where tree and shadow cede to the unknown, and maybe that seems like nothing so very special in a place like Beqanna, a place where myth and monsters have been known for centuries. Maybe that is why it seems so forgotten, so ignored – so much the better. There is no one to see when she steps into the weak godfingers of light that reach down between the empty canopy above, curling around the sharp cut of her jaw, cutting themselves on the points of long canines. The light bleeds down her chin, dappling her golden chest as she weaves out of shadow and darkness. Her path suggests she’s come from an impossible place - there is no way to know, not really.

The place that was once her home is fractured and broken, full of winter’s deadly hush. Nothing around her seems to stir, but she pauses, listening anyway. Cold silence presses down upon her back with its leaden weight, filling her ears with a noiseless roar, plucking at her heart and her belly with its whispers of death, of despair, of withering. All the lively green things are black under its touch, are waiting only for the warmth of spring to rot and fall away. And yet, and yet…

Not even winter can stop the squirrels. The sungold mare turns her head to the noisome rattling of a squirrel among the frost-blasted weeds, tail bent forward across its back against the biting air. Her own pale tail flicks lazily against her haunches as the little beast digs through leaf litter and loam for its hidden stores. Her breath rolls from her nostrils in great white clouds. It makes her think of dragons. It makes her bristle, makes her sneer, as she turns her attention up the path to something larger than the rooting squirrels. For a moment, she considers evading it, you can see it in the shift of her haunches, the twitch of her ear, but then-- no.

Why should she be the one who yields?

Beryl

This is the table equivalent of pajamas

[Torryn]

YOU'RE WALKING IN THE SHADOWS OF YOUR FEAR AND YOU'RE HEADED
FOR THE GALLOWS, SIN AROUND YOUR THROAT AND NO ONE'S NEAR

He liked to lie to himself and say he did not feel connected to anyone, and that he did not need to.
Not ever since the earth swallowed him and spat him out shadowed and changed, insatiable and perpetually dissatisfied.

He has loved, but mostly he has lost, though much of that has been by his own hand. There had been a time when he had thought that him and the monster he had brought back inside of him from the underlands could coexist, and that Torryn could live the life he had felt was owed to him as a normal, plain boy born in Taiga to two loving parents. The years have proven otherwise, and, one by one, he severed ties with nearly everyone.

It is so much easier, to be alone.
Not for him, for the rest of them.
His cravings did not dull in the solitude; that yawning emptiness was enough to swallow him whole from the inside out, but he rarely allowed himself the luxury of leaving to hunt anymore. Instead he let his prey come to him. They were often few and far between in the darkest pits of the forest, but those that did find themselves lost in the labyrinth of trees and shadow were often so saturated in fear that they dripped with it.

He is never satiated, but it is enough to keep him here, hidden in the heart of darkness.

But on the edge of the forest, where it turns to a strange haze and your eyes refuse to let you see what lies beyond, he finds her.

Swathed in darkness, with only his unsettling red eyes to give him away, he almost turns away before she can see him. That would have been perhaps the kindest thing he has ever done—for her, or for anyone. It has been years since he last abandoned Despoina, when he stopped pretending he could offer her love and not just madness, when in a rare moment of clarity he decided that never again would he feed on her despair.

Seeing Beryl ignites something in him, a selfish hunger that is nothing like the starving ache he usually feels. He had practiced in his head a thousand times what he might do should he see Despoina again, so that he might better steel himself against his own weakness, but he had not considered what he might do if he crossed paths with someone else that had always so effortlessly held his interest.

“Beryl,” he says her name before he can stop himself, his glowing red eyes no longer strange and disembodied in the surrounding dark as he steps forward and only the shadows of his body remain. She seems different, though he cannot place why. He does not realize that she has been gone for years; time held so little meaning for him. “Did you ever find that escape you had been searching for?”

T O R R Y N

@Beryl